A tale of two cellists: Meet Laura van der Heijden and Sheku Kanneh-Mason
What are the chances? You wait years for debut albums by cello-playing former winners of the BBC Young Musician, then two come along at once.
2012 winner Laura van der Heijden was first out of the gates with 1948, an album reflecting that year's purge of musicians in Stalinist Russia.
A decree by the congress of composers denounced the likes of Prokofiev and Shostakovich for writing "inexpressive, unharmonious" music that "smells strongly of the spirit of the modern bourgeois music of Europe and America".
"You don't really know about the effect of a decree like that if you just hear about it in history books," explains van der Heijden. "But several composers were crying that day in the Moscow conservatory.
"It had a really huge effect on the musical community in Russia."
Her album includes compositions by Prokofiev and Myaskovsky, while Shostakovich appears on Sheku Kanneh-Mason's album via the cello concerto he performed to win 2016's Young Musician competition.
His record, called Inspiration, also features interpretations of Bob Marley's No Woman, No Cry and Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah (which the cellist memorably performed at last year's Bafta Awards).
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